Category Archives: Uncategorized

The BART strike is on hold, but a group of data visualization guys and I made a series to inform the public about it. Hack the BART Strike My vis of BART ridership Atlantic Cities posts one of the visualizations of BART employee salaries My take on the strike and fairness arguments at Medium

I have a theory about Booker T. Washington. He is most often remembered as an orator, educator, or sellout, but what no one appreciates about Washington is that he distinguished the two models of education–signalling and human capital formation–well before there existed the intellectual vocabulary to express his opinions succinctly. Like Bryan Caplan today, it’s clear [...]

It’s silly how news compares entities without any weighting system for population. For example, Scott Sumner says that the most important news story of 2013 is China’s pro-market reform. With China this is somewhat excusable as their language and culture are vastly different, but India is a Commonwealth country where everything is printed in English [...]

Paul Krugman has a post on Pittsburgh, where I once lived for six years and hope to live again: It’s hard to avoid the sense that greater Pittsburgh, by taking better care of its core, also improved its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. In that sense, Detroit’s disaster isn’t just about industrial decline; it’s [...]

In A Denser San Francisco, Reihan Salam notes the Bay’s paradox: Despite San Francisco’s reputation as a hotbed of progressivism, the city is in many respects very “conservative,” which is to say resistant to change. Many San Franciscans are adamant that the look of the city remains frozen in its midcentury state. I used to [...]

Dr. Eric Rasumsen at U. of Indiana has a great informal paper: How Immigration Can Hurt a Country. To me this work is what makes me optimistic about academia in the Internet age: professors can ship product directly once they get tenure and still create quite a buzz. Also, because informal publication does not have [...]

Tesla Motors is trying to sell cars directly to customers in its own stores and online, much the way Apple does. Unfortunately, states have laws designed to increase the profits of dealers at the expense of customers. Interestingly, Tesla is having the most trouble in blood red Republican states (WSJ India ungated link) Some states, like [...]

A few weeks ago I wrote that China’s urbaniztion policy was driven by the state’s desire to make households less self-sufficient, to get people trading their labor for goods and services, because the state reaps a share of formal transactions but not household production. I noted this answer was more likely than Dr. Karl Smith’s [...]

My roommate Victor Powell has made an illustration of the Central Limit Theorem that is getting a lot of attention online. It’s made in d3.js which is what we’re using at the Visualizing Urban Data ideaLab. We are making one right now about fat-tailed distributions a la Taleb. Here is the CLT: